Safety Detectives: Please share your company background, how you got started, and your mission.
Deceptive Bytes: Our story begins more than a decade ago, as three brothers with various backgrounds who wanted to work together. Avi (CTO and cybersecurity expert), Hen (VP R&D and experienced software developer), and I (CEO) talked about getting more experience so that one day we could open a company together, but we didn’t have an idea back then. Five years ago, we thought about a way to prevent malware, using its own defenses and techniques, did some research, and saw no one used the same method so we decided to establish Deceptive Bytes and build the solution.
Our mission is to help SME/SMBs, enterprises, and MSSPs reduce operational burden and costs by closing the gap and preventing unknown and sophisticated cyberattacks that are able to evade other security systems.
SD: What is the main service your company offers?
DB: We provide our customers and partners with our Active Endpoint Deception platform, which dynamically responds to attacks as they evolve and change their outcomes. Our patented technology, which is built into our solution, creates deceptive information based on the current detected stage of compromise through the entire Endpoint Kill Chain. This covers the evolving nature of the advanced threat landscape and sophisticated malware techniques, stopping all threats without relying on signatures, patterns, or the need for constant updates.
SD: What is something unique that helps you stay ahead of your competition?
DB: I believe the most unique thing is that we’re using deception on the endpoint, unlike other solutions that use signatures to identify each malware or use machine learning and AI which focuses on detecting malicious behavior by threat actors, recording everything to better understand what’s going on the endpoint and eventually creating a lot of noise for the security team handling each alert. We don’t provide detection alerts, only prevention notifications, so the operator doesn’t need to do anything else in response to the attack.
We also created a platform that is very easy to use; the user doesn’t need to be a security expert in order to operate it. A quick guide and even a novice tech person in any organization can operate our platform.
In addition to all of that, the solution itself was developed in user-mode which helps reduce that attack surface caused by kernel-based solutions and is less likely to cause any operational issues (BSOD in Windows for example) to the end-users, especially during OS updates (like kernel-based solutions).
SD: What do you think are the worst cyberthreats today?
DB: I don’t think there’s any dispute in the industry that ransomware is the worst cyberthreat organizations are facing. Each attack causes more damage and the ransomware gangs’ demands are getting higher and higher. The problem with ransomware attacks is not just encrypting the data anymore; they also steal and expose the information they gather if their demands are not met, which damages the reputation of the organization and exposes their customers’ and employees’ data to the world.
Social engineering is also a great threat to organizations, which also leads to malware attacks and information theft. Threat actors are becoming more sophisticated in the way they convince their victims to perform certain tasks to advance their attack (clicking on malicious links, downloading malicious files and documents, etc.).
The main challenge defenders face is recognizing new threats as they become more sophisticated and harder to identify. Our focus as an endpoint security solution provider is to know how threat actors defend themselves, which doesn’t change between different types of attacks, and helps organizations prevent such attacks.